Alameda County Santa Rita Jail 

5325 Broder Blvd, Dublin, CA 94568

Santa Rita Jail is a county jail located in Dublin, Alameda County, California, next to the training area of the Camp Parks Reserve Forces, run by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. Santa Rita holds most of the people arrested in Alameda County, San Francisco Bay Area’s East Bay, which covers the towns of Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro, Fremont and Alameda. As the Federal Correctional Institution, Santa Rita is not the only local detention facility, Dublin is situated on Camp Parks grounds.

The first Santa Rita Jail was built in 1947 near the current site on a former WWII training base. By 1983, overcrowding had become a concern, and plans were drawn up to build the new $172 million facility which opened in 1989. Funding for the building of the prison was provided by government bonds and matching funds from local counties. The proposed 113-acre (0.46 km2) facility is built out in a traditional hierarchical “campus” layout, similar to many modern prisons, half a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide. The facility has 18 separate, self-contained housing units, a “heart” building containing central reservation, release and administration, and a laundry, administrator, kitchen and warehouses service building. Santa Rita is California’s third largest prison and the fifth largest in the U.S., and is considered a “mega-jail” to house 4,000 prisoners at any time, making it as large and larger than many state prisons in California.

An automated robotic cart machine travels through the prison all meals, laundry, commissary items, supplies and garbage, allowing maximum restriction of prisoner movement across the facility. In Spring 2002, a 1.2 megawatt peak-power solar array was installed on the housing unit roofs, providing about one-half of the prison’s power demand during daylight hours. This solar array represents the Western Hemisphere’s largest such rooftop array. In May 2006, Chevron Energy Solutions installed a 1-megawatt fuel cell system that generates 8,000,000 kWh of electricity and 1,4 MMBtu of waste heat from natural gas (50% and 18% of Jail’s needs, respectively).